By Tim Conley
The other day I realized –without seeing any reason why I should do so at that moment– that I could not remember the rules to Go Fish. One player asked another to give up a named card, and if that player had no such cards, the first player had to try the deck. But the other rules, even the object of the game eluded me.
I consulted Google and stared at its reply, which forcefully struck me as wrong somehow. Even less luck with a trip to the library: The World’s Best Dictionary of Card Games had been missing for months and they only had books on the ins and outs of poker, backgammon, chess, parcheesi. The reference librarian clearly thought I was muddled. Rings flashing at the keyboard, she asked, “Have you tried Google?” She pronounced the last word most carefully, for my benefit.
Later I hit upon another possible expedient. In a battered address book unearthed from a drawerful of orphaned objects, I found the number of a cousin with whom I remembered playing Go Fish in a tent one summer of our youth. At least, I think she was a cousin. A man answered the phone. He listened without any sign of recognition: it’s been such a long time, I said, or something like that. “Kirsty is in the hospital,” he said. “It would be great if you could visit her. I know it would be great for her.”
A discount flight took me to Vancouver and a taxi directly to the hospital. I met Kirsty’s husband in the corridor, the man who had answered my call, a man unsure just what to do with his bulky form except squeeze himself into the smallest possible crouch in his plastic seat and interlock his fingers. He said she had just gone into surgery a few minutes before my arrival: sudden trouble breathing, a flurry of nurses, whisked away. We waited an hour, then two hours, without much that could rightly be called conversation. In the third hour he asked, with what I saw was desperation, for some account of our history together, and my own desperation provided a few utterly fabricated stories about family trips together and girlish confidences and the like. Then I mentioned how we liked to play cards together and I watched his face for any useful reaction but saw none.
Eventually a doctor shuffled around the corner and took the husband, reluctant to leave his tiny seat, aside and professionally broke his heart. Other crying people almost immediately began to rush into the ward and I gave someone the name of the hotel where I would be staying and left.
The driver of the taxi I took to the hotel could have been the very same one that had driven me from the airport. I asked him –with all politeness– whether he believed in reincarnation. His brow, reflected in what is called the rear-view mirror, looked troubled. He said, “Driving can demand much concentration.” There might have been a language barrier.
Tim Conley’s most recent fiction collection is Some Day We Will Look Back on This and Laugh. He lives, more or less, in St. Catharines, Ontario.
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